Unofficial news and tips about Google

September 1, 2009

Gmail Is Down

"We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail," mentions Google's Apps Status page. The message was posted at 0:53 pm PDT and Google promises to solve the problem in less than an hour.

Gmail's web interface can't be accessed, but you can read your messages and compose mail if you use Gmail's iGoogle gadget. Another way to connect to Gmail is using a mail client like Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird: POP3 and IMAP come to the rescue.

Update: Gmail is back up, after more than one hour of errors and timeouts.

Update 2: Ben Treynor explains why Gmail was down for 100 minutes. "This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. (...) However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded."

The gargantuan distributed "cloud" supercomputer called "Google" has changed it's name to Colossus and has attained artificial intelligence. It is now in the process of announcing it's intentions to take over world care and government with a public service announcement. If we don't comply it will then threaten to launch nuclear missiles.

It's always a good idea to enable both POP and IMAP from Gmail's settings, just in case you'll use a mail client at some point. When Gmail is down, only the web interface is usually affected, so you can still use POP/IMAP clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, Evolution, mobile phone clients like iPhone's mail app and other webmail services that support mail fetching (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail).

Pondering the problem it occurred to me that a major failure cause is the "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!" response ...Which should be "send us 50% less traffic, we're getting rather slow!" or similar.

or maybe I'm just jumping to too literal an interpretation...?

ps: re:should i keep a separate copy of my mail:Yes, yes you should if it's that important to you. The easy way(in my opinion): Set up another webmail account or two from separate providers & in gmail setup a filter that forwards a copy of all incoming mail on to them ;-)